IoT Interview With Cayenne About Their Innovative Drag-And-Drop Project Builder

Here is a detailed interview withBenny Estes, Product Manager at Cayenneabout his take on IoT, where it is heading, their innovative world first drag-and-drop project builder and the next steps. Read on.

Benny Estes, of myDevices, demonstrating an automation use case using the Cayenne project builder.

Can you tell us about yourself, your company and what it does?

Our company is myDevices, and we created Cayenne, a free drag-and-drop project builder that makes building IoT and automation projects faster and easier. Cayenne simplifies the process of connecting and controlling hardware, so it’s perfect for makers working on home automation projects and for professional engineers doing rapid prototyping at their companies.

I’m Benny Estes, Cayenne’s Product Manager, which gives me the great opportunity to be in regular contact with our users and enterprise customers, and also to work closely with our engineers and developers to build Cayenne based on the feedback we get in our Community and organizations we work with.

How would you define IoT?

I’d define IoT as the concept of connecting ordinary things to the Internet and allow them to talk to each other. IoT creates new opportunities by allowing users and machines to interact with the environment and make data-driven decisions.

How do you see IoT evolving? Where do you see it is heading in the next 2 years?

IoT is evolving rapidly, but right now it’s still largely behind the scenes. A lot of people know what the Nest thermostat does and why it’s so convenient, but not as many associate it with IoT. The same thing is true of Uber: people know how convenient it is to use an Internet-enabled phone to call for a ride, but they don’t realize that they’re interacting with IoT. As people start hearing more about IoT, they’ll start noticing it when they encounter it in daily life, which will increase public awareness. Increased awareness always tends toward increased innovation, because more people will be thinking about it. As this begins to happen, I’m excited to see how IoT affects people and business in the next few years.

Can you tell us a little more about Cayenne, world’s first drag-and-drop project builder? How do you think it will help the IoT Community?

Our goal is to help support and expand IoT innovation for makers and business. Cayenne helps to lower the barrier of entry for people and companies who want to get involved with IoT through automation, rapid prototyping, and other creative projects. And once we release our API, Cayenne’s online and mobile dashboard will become available to hardware manufacturers and users alike, which will increase the breadth and depth of IoT use cases and projects.

With Cayenne, we set out to solve a problem in the IoT world: developers and enterprises wanting to start IoT prototypes, projects, or ideas, but not knowing how to start. Since we launched eight months ago, tens of thousands of people have signed up for Cayenne, and what started with just the Raspberry Pi now includes Arduino, and will soon feature an MQTT API that will allow people to bring on any device and control it in Cayenne. Simplifying IoT functionality by making it easy, visual, and fast was a start, but enabling this platform to work with any hardware makes it also a powerful dashboard for applications at all levels.

What is next for myDevices?

I’m glad you asked, because I only touched on it briefly earlier. We at myDevices are really set on making the best IoT project builder out there. As an example, WordPress simplified the web building process, but remained powerful enough to be useful to both novices and professionals in web building. Similarly, Cayenne will soon be able to work with any hardware, and it has the potential to become the de facto tool for IoT because it simplifies the project building process while remaining powerful enough to allow advanced users to focus more on creativity and automation, and less on the coding details.

Can you tell us a little more about your partnership with SIGFOX and how it will impact the IoT interoperability?

SIGFOX-compliant hardware is so widely used that it will play a strong role in the development of smart cities, modern agriculture, infrastructure control, and more. Combining their hardware compatibility with the powerful features of Cayenne will enable those who develop IoT systems of the future to have devices communicate and work together, easily visualize their data online and on mobile, and have access to the suite of Cayenne software features.

Planning and implementing are his forte and he keeps IoT League on track. An IoT engineer by profession with a deep interest, passion and understanding about IoT. You can reach him on sreevenkitesh@iotleague.com